The Price of Freeing the Oppressed

http://www.nysun.com/article/43860

On late Friday afternoon, with President Bush arriving in Hanoi for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, news broke of a casualty in Iraq. His name was Tung Nguyen, 38, a sergeant first class, and a member of the U.S. Army Special Forces.

Nguyen had died in a firefight in Baghdad on Tuesday. The Army is investigating the events of Nguyen's death, an inquiry that will look into the possibility of friendly fire. There have been 2,864 fighting men and women killed in Iraq, and a story lies behind each and every one of them. But the arc of Nguyen's life, which began in Vietnam and ended in Iraq, says as much about sacrifice and what it means to be American as any of them.

He was born the year of the Tet Offensive, the great turning point in Vietnam on two fronts: It was the year the Viet Cong expended the bulk of its resources turning the conflict from an insurgency to a war more directly executed by the North Vietnamese army. It also marked the moment when the American public, surprised by the enemy offensive on Saigon, and elsewhere throughout the country, began to lose heart in the struggle.

Eight months before Nguyen's birth, in October, Special Forces Company D, headquartered in his hometown of Cantho, fought off an attack. The elite soldiers, the Green Berets, who defended Cantho did so under the Special Forces motto "de oppresso liber," which is a fancy Latin phrase meaning "to free the oppressed."

The Special Forces were among the first Americans to fight and die in Vietnam. President Kennedy believed that these unconventional troops could be an important tool in the fight against communism. He visited the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, N.C., in 1961, an institution that took Kennedy's name after his assassination two years later.

It was a member of the Special Forces, Paul Campbell, a sergeant like Nguyen, who was the first American to hike into the Central Highlands in 1961 and provide medical treatment to the mountain people, the Montagnards. Special Force A-Teams followed suit in the years to come, going into camps throughout Vietnam, shoring up defenses, leading groups of irregular fighters, and dispensing medical care.

The Americans left Vietnam in 1975 and several years thereafter so did Nguyen. The details are still sketchy. Following the fall of Saigon, Nguyen fled Vietnam with relatives, leaving his parents behind. This was the era of the Vietnamese boat people, when thousands of opponents of the communist regime and those seeking a better life made their way to sometimes makeshift boats and left the country. Nguyen ended up in Tracy, Calif., outside of Modesto. He struggled to bring his parents to America and graduated from Tracy High School in 1986.

He was first an infantryman, then a paratrooper, serving in the 101st Airborne Division, and, finally, a Green Beret. A crack shot, foster brother Jim Cracraft told the Modesto Bee, Nguyen's ambition was to join the military. Recognized as a master marksman, Nguyen became an instructor at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center in 2003 and, later, shipped out to Iraq.

Much more can probably be learned about Nguyen's service in Iraq. Right now details are scarce. The Army press release states that Nguyen was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart, the Iraq Campaign Medal, the Bronze Star, and the Combat Infantryman Badge, which denotes action under fire and combat with the enemy.

Forty years ago, another Special Forces sergeant, Barry Sadler, had a number one hit song with "The Ballad of the Green Berets." In his fifth verse, Sadler sang "Back at home a young wife waits, Her Green Beret has met his fate, He has died for those oppressed." Like the soldier in "The Ballad," Nguyen had a wife at home, Marcia. She will mourn Nguyen at a private funeral at Fort Bragg tomorrow.

Nguyen, in turn, will not be forgotten. Members of Special Forces alumni chapters have a tradition of paying tribute to their fallen brothers for years to come. In Las Vegas, for example, the members of Chapter 51 gather every month. They commence each meeting reciting the names of those Special Forces soldiers killed that month. The list for November begins with Sergeant First Class William Everheart, killed in 1963, and contains 74 other names, most of them killed in the land of Nguyen's birth.

No matter what happens with troop levels in Iraq in the coming months, members of the U.S. Army Special Forces will surely be putting themselves in harm's way throughout the world in the years to come. They will do so selflessly, in the name of the Special Forces motto "de oppresso liber," to free the oppressed.

Yes, free the oppressed. But what if they didn't want to be free? Blow their brains out yeah? Massacre at Hathida seems to be in news now

I'm sure by the time he died, he had killed plenty of Iraqi civilians. Let's see, more than a hundred thousand Iraquis have died directly or indirectly at the hands of the American troops while only two to three thousand American troops have been killed. So, for every dead American troop, about fifty Iraqi civilians have to die. For killing that many Iraqi civilians, I don't think Tung's gonna be reincarnated as human.

WARNING. If you're under-age, don't click on the links (underlined).

Requiem.

Nguyen was born in 1968, a year famous for the American liberation of My Lai, where, for hours and hours, 508 villagers, mostly old people, women and little children, were freed to death; women, little girls and babies were raped, then savagely slaughtered by American Special Forces, as in the good ole traditions of Americans ever since they became a nation after they famously liberated beforehand the natives who inhabited the land now called USA.

Nguyen was conceived in 1967, the year which saw the setting up of an International War Crimes Tribunal "designed to investigate and publicize war crimes and conduct of the American forces and its allies during the Vietnam War". The tribunal was constituted in November, 1966 and conducted over two sessions in 1967 in Stockholm, Sweden and Copenhagen, Denmark. Representatives of 18 countries participated in the two sessions of this tribunal, formally calling itself the
International War Crimes Tribunal.

Conclusions and Verdicts of the Tribunal
The Tribunal stated that its conclusions were:

1. Has the Government of the United States committed acts of aggression against Vietnam under the terms of international law? Yes (unanimously).
2. Has there been, and if so, on what scale, bombardment of purely civilian targets, for example, hospitals, schools, medical establishments, dams, etc? Yes (unanimously). We find the government and armed forces of the United States are guilty of the deliberate, systematic and large-scale bombardment of civilian targets, including civilian populations, dwellings, villages, dams, dikes, medical establishments, leper colonies, schools, churches, pagodas, historical and cultural monuments. We also find unanimously, with one abstention, that the government of the United States of America is guilty of repeated violations of the sovereignty, neutrality and territorial integrity of Cambodia, that it is guilty of attacks against the civilian population of a certain number of Cambodian towns and villages.
3. Have the governments of Australia, New Zealand and South Korea been accomplices of the United States in the aggression against Vietnam in violation of international law? Yes (unanimously). The question also arises as to whether or not the governments of Thailand and other countries have become accomplices to acts of aggression or other crimes against Vietnam and its populations. We have not been able to study this question during the present session. We intend to examine at the next session legal aspects of the problem and to seek proofs of any incriminating facts.
4. Is the Government of Thailand guilty of complicity in the aggression committed by the United States Government against Vietnam? Yes (unanimously).
5. Is the Government of the Philippines guilty of complicity in the aggression committed by the United States Government against Vietnam? Yes (unanimously).
6. Is the Government of Japan guilty of complicity in the aggression committed by the United States Government against Vietnam? Yes, (by 8 Votes to 3). The three Tribunal members who voted against agree that the Japanese Government gives considerable aid to the Government of the United States, but do not agree on its complicity in the crime of aggression.
7. Has the United States Government committed aggression against the people of Laos, according to the definition provided by international law? Yes (unanimously).
8. Have the armed forces of the United States used or experimented with weapons prohibited by the laws of war? Yes (unanimously).
9. Have prisoners of war captured by the armed forces of the United States been subjected to treatment prohibited by the laws of war? Yes (unanimously).
10. Have the armed forces of the United States subjected the civilian population to inhuman treatment prohibited by international law? Yes (unanimously).
11. Is the United States Government guilty of genocide against the people of Vietnam? Yes (unanimously).

Indeed, 1968... "We need to destroy the town in order to save it"... The Imperial City of Huê' was 80% destroyed by the heroic American Armed Forces' indiscriminate naval shellings and B-52s' bombings. Many thousands of innocent civilians were to be liberated...

1968... It was already 6 long years, since President John F. Kennedy ordered the assassination of anti-communist South Vietnam's president Ngo Dinh Diem, 6 long years with the war escalation by President Lindon B. Johnson... 6 long years, i.e. 314 weeks and more, that the valliant American Armed Forces had been liberating an average of minimum 2,000 "g@@ks" Vietnamese per week of Search and Destroy, carpet bombing...

This score is to be compared with that of the Israelians' Air Force who, in July and August 2006, liberated only more than one thousand Lebanese civilians in 5 weeks, of whom 2/3 were little children (of course, they also half-liberated some 4,000 more, with the same ratio of little children. Mind you, their pilots were also trained in the USA in the good ole Americans' traditions, and their planes and their bombs were paid for yearly in $ billions by good ole American taxpayers' money).

1968... So far, not many millions Vietnamese were liberated, many more millions were to be added to the figures until 1973... half of the 58,000 cool GIs who passed away in the Vietnam War were also liberated by their courageous American comrades...

***
Nguyen was a brave American soldier in the good ole American tradition, and this thread should go to the American Chat, sub forum Necrology-from-Iraq's OIL (Operation Iraq Liberation).

EDIT.
On second thought, bring the maximum of the American fucking Special Forces you can here in Viet Chat, so that we write asap a group requiem before the year ends.